The
field of Balkan studies constitutes a relative late-comer to the ranks of
accepted academic endeavor in the university world. A sure indication of
this is that though the 20th century is the century of scholarly congresses,
the first international congress of Balkan studies took place (in Sofia)
only in 1966. Smaller conferences and collaborative volumes on the Balkans
had, of course, materialized earlier than the Sofia Congress. The two
volumes of the
Revue International des Etudes Balkaniques (1935-1936) set a
meritorious example for scholars, an example which was imitated only in
recent years, first in Germany and then in the United States. The
Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft published two excellent volumes containing broad
interpretative essays on the whole range of Balkan history, and in 1963 the
University of California Press published the papers from the first American
Balkan Conference, held at Berkeley in 1960.

The
conference which the UCLA Russian and East European Studies Center sponsored
in October 1969, is in the tradition of these earlier conferences and
constitutes the second meeting to concentrate on a broad Balkan theme in the
United States. In formulating the various subjects the organizing committee
attempted to cover broad sectors of the experience and manifestations of
civilized man: archaeology, language, ethnology, social evolution, religion,
art, music, literature, oral poetry, economics, political ideology. To the
degree that it was possible, an effort was made to deal with these broad
categories, common to civilized men, rather than to view the area
exclusively in terms of each distinct ethnic group. There are, of course,
many aspects which were not covered, and some aspects were treated as
manifested in one particular ethnic

*. Concluding remarks delivered at the closing session of
the Coference.

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group. In response to this, one can only plead the inevitable divergence
between Utopia and reality. Limits of money, time, knowledge, and ability
have ever stood as barriers to the attainment of the ideal.

These
various aspects (discussed in the conference), along with others, constitute
culture in the broadest sense. But what is culture, in specific reference to
the papers of this conference? One should, perhaps, begin to define culture
by saying what it is not. During the discussions one commentator remarked
that "Balkan culture is something which will soon be relegated to museums".
To him culture is represented by a series of physical artifacts which, when
no longer utile, serve no other function than to amuse the idle museum
visitors. This view of culture is a clear and classic illustration of the
static concept of culture which has, too often, plagued the historian,
classicist, and others. All such scholars see culture as a static
phenomenon. The condition of a given society at a particular moment in time,
e.g. Periclean Athens, Justinianic Byzantium, or medieval France under
Charlemagne, represents the culture par excellence of that society. Because
of their static concept of culture such scholars tend to see any fundamental
change in some aspects of that culture as proof of the discontinuity and
even of the death ofthat culture. They have, traditionally, inferred these
cultural breaks in terms of the disruption of political institutions, the
changes within a language, and/or the decline of ethnic 'purity'.

But
as we all know, the present-day concept of culture is something much more
comprehensive and complex, a concept for which we are primarily indebted to
anthropology. From the time that Tylor, the renegade classicist turned
anthropologist, founded this discipline and posited the definition of
culture, this term has always implied a dynamic and holistic concept.
Culture includes all the manifestations of human activity, which
manifestations or aspects are in a constant state of adjustment. Obviously
the adjustments demanded in one period may be more radical than those
required in another. In this respect the organizers of the conference
arranged the topics in a chronological order so as to span some of these
periods when radical adjustments were necessary and when the tempo of change
accelerated :

1.
The period of the neolithic culture in the Balkans.

2.
The arrival and evolution of the earlier Indo-European peoples (Greeks, and
predecessors of the Rumanians and Albanians).

3.
The coming of the Slavs and Bulgars (6th-7th centuries).

4.
The transition from Byzantine to Ottoman hegemony.

5.
The impact of western Europe.

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All
these periods represent fundamental transitions, accelerations of change, in
the history of the inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula.

The
title of the conference reads, "Aspects of the Balkans: Continuity and
Change". Scholars who share the older, static view of culture, would either
be amused or distressed at the inclusion of two such words in any
description of these five chronological categories in Balkan history. They
would find the two terms mutually exclusive within the context of the
history and culture of the Balkan area, and would argue somewhat as follows.
The language and peoples (and therefore the culture) of the Balkans today
have nothing to do with those of late antiquity. There has been a brutal and
complete cultural rupture in the Balkans between these two periods. All has
changed — xà Ttdvra pet. A cursory glimpse at the contemporary Balkan
situation would seem to confirm this view. The political, economic, and
social institutions, literature, art, religion, and language today are quite
different from those in evidence during the late ancient and early medieval
period. Thus the older style scholarship posits 'continuity OR change'.

The
conceptualization of historical and cultural phenomena as phenomena which
result from EITHER change OR continuity is the traditional characteristic of
the static view of culture. In such conceptualizations change excludes
continuity, and continuity excludes change. Thus we are reduced to the
dilemma of xà rcavxa pet, or xà râvxa uévev. But this is a false dilemma.
Rarely does it occur that a historical culture changes suddenly and
completely, and it occurs just as rarely that such a culture remains exactly
as it is without any change. In the cultural evolution of the Balkans the
historian is faced with a case of continuity AND change at the same time.
Continuity and change constitute the seeming paradox of culture. Continuity
represents the old, change the new ingredients. They are as two vector
forces, and culture is the resultant force. One can transform this language
from the realm of the physical to that of the metaphysical by saying that
continuity is thesis, change is antithesis, and culture represents the
synthesis.

The
differences in the culture of the Balkan peoples of today and of antiquity
are, naturally, very great. This is also true of the cultures of other
peoples when one compares their state at two chronological periods widely
separated by time. Rather one must follow the changes in the various
cultural manifestations at every chronological step, and particularly at
great junctures, such as those which we have tried to span in this
conference. When one proceeds to an examination of cultural conditions in
successive phases, rather than in two widely separated periods, the

445

examination reveals less change and stronger elements of continuity in
cultural evolution. When the historian examines Balkan culture in the time
of Diocletian and then compares it with the culture of the Balkans in the
period after the Second World War he must take into account the accumulated
effect of 1,700 years of development.

One
may conceive of this long cultural evolution in the Balkans as a complex
series of smaller evolutions within the spheres of ethnology, languages,
literature, political institutions, etc.

The
conference papers have not only presented substantial evidence in support of
the thesis of 'continuity AND change', in the historical evolution of the
peoples inhabiting the Balkans, but they have pushed back in time the
starting point of elements in this culture. The establishment of a much
longer neolithic epoch (sixth-seventh millennia) with a culture which was
not merely derivative of the Near Eastern neolithic culture, suggests that
the economic bases of this cultural evolution in the Balkans are older than
formerly imagined. By a reconsideration of the linguistic evidence it seems
likely that the Indo-Europeanization of the Balkan peninsula is a phenomenon
of the fourth or third millennium, and not of the second millennium. Thus
basic constituents in the linguistic and ethnic components of the Balkan
cultural evolution were, in all likelihood, present at a very early date. In
the realms of language and ethnography there were of course, two major
changes. These resulted from the migration of the Slavs and Bulgars in the
6th-7th centuries of the Christian era and from the invasion of the Turks in
the 14th-15th centuries. Of these newer peoples in the Balkans it was the
Slavs who effected the most significant changes as they imposed their
language upon the inhabitants and regions of the north and central Balkans.
But in the areas of present-day Rumania, Greece and Albania, the Slavs were
absorbed and almost completely transformed linguistically. Thus there was no
complete ethnic or linguistic rupture in the Balkans as a whole. In addition
the Slavs and Bulgars were gradually transformed by the religious, economic,
political, and other cultural institutions of the older Balkan populations,
especially by those institutions and influences emanating from Byzantium.
Thus, despite the significant linguistic and ethnic change in the central
and northern Balkans, which the Slavs effected, cultural continuity was
assured not only by the survival of the pre-Slavic peoples in Greece,
Rumania, and Albania, but also by the Byzantinization of the life of the
new-comers.

In
the sphere of religion we witness the same type of amalgamation.
Christianity, in its external appearance, is markedly different from

446

paganism, and its triumph in the Balkans might lead one to believe that it
brought a complete break with the pagan past. But though Christianity did
triumph it did so only through compromise which incorporated, on a large
scale, Graeco-Roman, Slavic, and other pagan elements on the folk level, and
the tools, language, and concepts of pagan Greek philosophy on the formal
level. Balkan Christianity remained, throughout, a remarkable hybrid. At the
next stage Islamization affected only a minority of the Balkan population
and even there the resultant Islam was heavily colored by elements from the
pagan and Christian pasts of the Balkan converts.

The
same type of evolution, containing old and new elements and therefore
embodying both continuity and change, is discernible in literature,
painting, and folk poetry. Byzantine literature and painting, with
discernible roots in the Graeco-Roman past, became the models for literature
and painting throughout the Orthodox Balkans. The removal of the Orthodox
political hegemony and appearance of a Muslim state did not break the
continuity in these domains of intellectual and artistic production. The
style and conceptualization of western Europe was first accommodated to
these of the Balkans via Balkan artists and literati who integrated them
into the Byzantino-Balkan traditions of religious painting and literature.
Even the late 19th century South Slavic Modernist poetry retained indigenous
elements in its adaptation of western poetic movements and genres. In the
realm of South Slavic poetry it has been argued that the Balkan Muslim epic
is an outgrowth of the Slavic ballads.

Enough has been said about the dynamics of cultural evolution in the Balkans
over the centuries to illustrate that alongside the many and great changes
there were strong elements of continuity. In the broadest sense it is not
possible to posit a brutal rupture in the cultural development of the Balkan
peoples in the long period from late antiquity to the present. There was
never a time, in the long period we are considering, when the changes in all
these aspects or facets of culture coincided and coincided in such a fashion
as to obliterate completely all significant traces of that which preceded.

The
validity of such a view will always rest on what you and your colleagues
will think and ascertain, collectively, in your research.

All
intense intellectual endeavor takes on the character of an intellectual
Odyssey. But it is not only the goal (Ithaca) itself which is important.
This is best illustrated by the differing symbolism of Ithaca which one
finds in Kavafis and Kazanzakis. Kavatis, in his poem
Ithaca,
exhorts

447

the
reader not to hurry his trip to Ithaca. Rather, he says, you should stop and
linger at all the mysterious ports, savoring their exotic goods. If, at the
end of the journey, you find Ithaca poor, rocky, and barren, do not be
disappointed. Ithaca gave you this adventure. The purpose of all Ithacas
will thus become clear to you.

In
Kazanzakis the arrival of Odysseus at Ithaca is only the beginning of the
hero's adventures. He found Penelope old, ugly, and frigid. Ithaca was
boring and too small to contain his energies and ambitions. So Odysseus,
having slain the suitors, set out for other lands and even more grandiose
advantures.

Our
own Balkan conference can be substituted for Ithaca in either of the
versions of Kavafis or Kazanzakis with results differing according to the
desires of each of us.